


Myself in You

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Action Heavy, Alternate Universe, Buffy Insert, Buffy in Space, DAMN YOU, F/M, Gore, How Do I Tag, Or at least reminded me this story existed, Post-Chosen, REENA MADE ME DO IT, Romance?, Season/Series 02, Violence, old story, reupload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 15:01:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10440441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Ronon wasn't the only Runner and Buffy isn't who she used to be.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Myself in You (can't go back remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12083010) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith). 



> A reup of an old story, newly polished and heavily edited in parts. Enjoy.

+

**Part One**

+

Slayer sighed, running a hand through her hair and frowning at the grime that stuck to her fingers afterward. She needed a shower. And food. And rest. Ah, hell, she needed an epidemic to kill all the Wraith in the galaxy so she could for once, just once, close her eyes without a gun in her hand, stay somewhere longer than twenty-four hours without being made _prey_. 

The word left a bitter taste, even in her thoughts. A taint. And a rage more potent than any she had experienced before that damn portal had dropped her right into the lap of the most vile and evil creatures she had ever met. It was a rage that had been boiling in her ever since that day. It had been slow coming at first, suppressed by morals and a yearning for home, peace, love. But one by one the Wraith had stripped those things from her, leaving her the way she was now.

Not prey.

Never prey. 

It was their fault to believe that they could break something such as her. No, Slayer didn’t break. She bent and she bided her time and when she finally struck, she painted the walls red. She was a wolf masquerading as a sheep, just long enough to draw them in. After three years of running from them, planet to planet, of turning their own sick games back on them, she was the killer Faith had always known was inside.

She sighed again, wiping her hand on her dirt stained pants. Faith. She wished the other woman could see her now. She’d be proud, probably. She’d point at her sister and tell the mini slayers, “See, that’s what being the slayer is all about.”

Shaking her head, Slayer shoved the thought to the back of her mind. She had been gone for three years as far as she knew. She had no clue how much time had passed on Earth. The Scoobies had given up looking for her a long time ago. That had been the deal when they had founded the New Council and started spreading across the globe. If someone disappeared, they spent one year looking for them. After that they stopped. 

They stopped because a loss was a loss and there was nothing to be done about it. Any longer, well, that way lay obsession and resurrection. 

Clinging to the past and people she would never see again was helping nothing.

She was here now, she was alive, on the run and damn hungry. Looking at the soft light of dusk settling around her she decided that she had twelve more hours at least, maybe more. There was no Wraith close to this planet, she knew. Their trackers, while damn accurate, didn’t reach very far in comparison to the vast space between some worlds. They would not catch the signal from the implant between her shoulder blades tonight. 

Unconsciously she rubbed her neck, as if to ease an itch. It was a useless gesture. The thing under her skin was unreachable even for someone as limber as her and the mound of scar tissue on top of it was all the proof she needed to never let any barn-world doctor near her with a scalpel again.

So a quick wash somewhere and after that a big dinner at the local tavern, it was. Ten hours of restless sleep and then she would jump again. She hadn’t been on Javor in almost thirteen months (according to the Ancient device strapped to her wrist and programmed to something approaching Earth’s measures of time) and it was nice this time of year.

+

Ronon Dex sat hunched over his beer, ignoring everything around him and yet not missing a thing. The Wraith had been here a few weeks ago, making the planet relatively safe for now but that didn’t mean he was going to let his guard down. There was always someone stupid enough to challenge him.

The door opened to admit a slight breeze from outside and with it came a tiny thing of a woman. Her long blonde hair was in a practical braid reaching her ass and her large eyes scanned the crowd for a bit of space and probably dinner. Her features were delicate and open and in another lifetime Ronon wouldn’t have hesitated half a second before going over there and flirting outrageously. 

In another lifetime. Now he simply envied her for every second she lived without fear and helpless rage crawling up and down her spine and the impotence of a single warrior fighting a vast army squirming in her gut.

She moved toward a free table at the back, sitting down and ordering some stew and water. The waitress looked at her a bit funny, not used to serving anything but beer, but complied, and Ronon turned back to his own drink.

Five minutes later there was a commotion where the blonde had just started eating. Turning to watch the scene with careful eyes, he saw a burly, drunkenly swaying man leaning over her, groping at her chest and laughing loudly. She shoved him off with the practiced ease of a woman traveling on her own, but he came back. They repeated the dance three more times before she pushed the drunk idiot away hard enough to send him on his ass. Then she grabbed her food and stood, looking around for something. She seemed to find it as her eyes fell on him because she started moving toward the bar and settled right beside him.

She appeared for all the world like a helpless, innocent woman – minus the shoving a moment ago - looking for a protector and she had chosen him. The irony was not lost on Ronon. That, however, did not mean that he was willing to save the damsel in distress.

“I won’t save you, little girl,” he growled as he noticed the calculating looks the drunk was giving him. All he wanted was to be left alone and enjoy one of the rare occasions that he could afford to feel relatively safe. He glared at her, waiting impatiently for her to back off and find another hero for the night. He wasn’t someone she wanted to play with, even if she didn’t realize it yet.

Instead she met his gaze head on and something flickered in her eyes. It was brief and almost invisible to all but those who knew what to look for. And Ronon did. There was death in her eyes.

No, this woman did not expect to be saved after all. She could defend herself. She needed him only for his presence because they were both warriors but the drunk idiots in here were too stupid to recognize her. They did recognize the dark, tall, brooding man beside her.

Wordlessly they both broke their gaze at the same time, returning to their food and drink. 

She paid for his next beer.

He didn’t chase her off, even after the drunk thought better of trying again.

+

As soon as the door to his room closed, Slayer was slammed into it, back first. She used the solid wood for leverage as she lifted her legs to wrap around Ronon’s waist and deepened their frantic kiss. His hands were on her waist, pulling her close with enough force to bruise a normal woman.

But Slayer was no normal woman and her only reaction was to dig her fingers deeper into the hard muscle of his biceps. Ronon stumbled backward, toward the bed in the middle of the room while she tugged at the hem of his shirt, pulling it upward. She released him from her leg hold in order to stand on tiptoe and help him pull it off in one swift motion. Then her hands were back, tracing the top of his leather pants, half request, half demand.

She found two knives tucked into the back of the waistband and pulled them out, dropping them with more care than she had his shirt. He hadn’t stopped when she found his knives and he didn’t stop when he found hers. They just kept kissing, groping, feeling, knowing without a word that it had been far too long for both of them.

Slayer’s hands crept up his spine, caressing and memorizing until she reached his shoulder blades and froze. There, right beneath her fingers was a mound of scars that was the twin to the one on her own back. The same place, the same scars, the same doom beneath them, silent, invisible and yet enough to break a person. She could feel the low hum of energy it emitted at all times under the pads of her fingers. Ronon did not freeze as he noticed her reaction, but took a step back and went for his last knife, dangling off his loosened belt.

The way he held it told her that he was getting ready to slit her throat as he growled, “Who are you?”

What was she supposed to answer? 

_I’m Slayer, but I was once a girl named Buffy and I hate them like you do? Fight them. Despise them._

Just her luck. The first person that cracked her shell just a little after all these lonely months was just like her. He had the same enemy, the same anger and helpless frustration, the same flicker of horrible things in his eyes. He understood. He was the same and he understood. 

The mere idea that there was someone else out there who was like her, who had experienced the same things as she had, threatened to fry her brains. He understood. He was like her.

So she did the only thing she could, gave the only answer she had left by carefully lowering her hands to the bottom of her shirt. She kept them in sight at all times as she lifted the tank top over her head and flung it to the floor. Then she pulled her braid over her shoulder and turned around slowly.

There was a gasp behind her, startled and filled with a sort of crippled hope. He sounded like she felt. She wasn’t alone. He understood.

+

Ronon recognized the look in her eyes as she turned around again, the look she had given him in the tavern because he now knew that it was his own. She was like him, was him, a mirror held in front of his face. He had never even considered that there might be others, had assumed that this hell was reserved for him only and now there was someone else.

The knife hit the ground with a clatter as he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her forward, devouring her in a kiss.

+

Sunlight was already trickling into the room when Ronon woke with a groan. That woman was a devil, he thought and then the rest of the night came rushing back to him. The scars on her back and oh gods, the way she looked at him, her eyes filled with hope, stomped down so hard it was barely there. He’d returned the look and seen himself in her.

He was suddenly overcome with the need to see if she was still there, but he needn’t have worried. As soon as he opened his eyes she was there, leaning on one elbow beside him, smiling down at him. Or as close to a smile as either of them ever came these days.

“Hey there, sleepy head.”

“Hey yourself,….Slayer.” He hesitated for a moment, hoping to draw a real name out of her, but she didn’t take the hint.

“I should get going. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been here for almost a day and it’s time to get moving.” The look of badly hidden regret on her face made up for not telling him her name. 

After the revelation the night before, they had spent hours seeking solace in someone they had never thought existed, but they knew it wouldn’t last. Two people were easier to track, slower on the move, forgot caution easier. Alone they could continue as they had, hiding, biding their time until they were free to slaughter every last one of the Wraith and paint planets in their blood. Alone they would survive long enough to gather what they were owed.

Besides, the voice of reason in Ronon’s head whispered, they didn’t know each other at all. He told the voice to shut the fuck up. 

He nodded, “Yeah. We should move.”

+

As they dressed quietly side by side, Slayer kept sneaking glances at Ronon. Time and time again she opened her mouth to say something, to ask one of the thousand questions that lay on the tip of her tongue. She always closed her mouth again before he noticed. She didn’t dare ask those things.

He was like her. He was a fighter, a survivor, a hater. A man living on borrowed time. She would not get attached, would not get to know him. Not now that she was finally cold enough to start forgetting about the life she once had.

“How long are the days where you’re from?” The question came out of the blue, startling her.

“What?”

“How long are the days on your home world?”

She shrugged, not seeing the point but not seeing any harm in giving him the information either. Most planets in the Pegasus galaxy had their own measures of time. One some worlds, a day lasted up to forty hours.

“Twenty-four hours. Why’d you ask?”

“And a year?”

She raised an eyebrow at his strange questions, “Something over 300 days.”

He pulled out a small pocket computer, much like the one she was just strapping to her wrist again, but not Ancient. He fed it some data before looking up through his dark hair. “300 of your days?”

Finally Slayer caught on and she couldn’t stop the grin from taking over her face. They could not stay together and they both knew it, but to have the assurance that somewhere out there someone was waiting for you, would miss you if you died-

She tied her hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck, rolled her shoulders. Exhaled. “Do you know Javor?”

Ronon looked thoughtful for a moment before nodding in agreement.

“There’s a cave about two miles from the gate. I crash there every once in a while.”

+

As she made her way toward the Stargate, Slayer gave the mental order to her bracer (which she called FAT, short for Freaky Ancient Thing) to sound an alarm in exactly 300 Earth days. A small beep from her forearm told her that her orders were received. She shook her head in mild amusement. Three years ago she hadn’t been able to write an e-mail and now she used the computer on her arm for the smallest thing. But then it was also a lot easier to handle than Earth computers. All she had to do was concentrate on what she wanted and voila, instant service. 

She linked the bracer with the Stargate as she walked, dialling Javor and walking straight into the gate. At the last possible moment she turned her head enough to see Ronon’s large figure a quarter mile away and ruthlessly stomped down on a wave of hope flooding through her.

+

The first year they met in the cave two miles south of the Javor gate. She told him her name was Buffy.

+

The second year they met in an abandoned Wraith shelter three miles east of the Stargate on Sator. They spent hours tracing each others’ scars and whispering the tales that went with them.

+

The third year they met in an old watch tower on Aura. She taught Ronon how to use a sword and for a month they stayed together.

+

The fourth year they met in a tavern on Anleez where he started the biggest bar fight she’d ever seen because a drunk soldier dared grope her ass.

+

He didn’t come the fifth year.

+

John Sheppard stepped into Atlantis with a wry smile on his face, followed by a smirking Ronon, a blank-faced Teyla and a bitching McKay. What else was new, he wondered silently as he waved to where the geeks were typing away on their toys. Elizabeth waved back from her place right in front of the gate platform.

“How did it go?” She asked.

John’s grin grew broader. “Those people are tough. They’re settling in well. They did almost drive McKay up the walls though. Something about wanting to get a detailed explanation about how our computers work right _now_. And then-”

He was interrupted when one of the geeks came jogging into the room, beeping wildly. Or rather, whatever he was dangling from his forefinger and thumb was beeping. He stopped in front of Ronon, out of breath and squeaked, “This went off while you were gone. It won’t stop and we didn’t think we should be playing with it because, well, it’s yours and so we locked it up because it was loud, but it still hasn’t stopped and-“

Ronon effectively shut the geek up by grabbing the hand held unit from him and asking in that slow dangerous tone he sometimes got when something bad was happening, “When?”

“Sorry?” The geek frowned while the rest of the team came closer to listen to the conversation and interfere if necessary. They’d all heard that tone of voice before and knew not to take it lightly.

Suddenly the big man moved, grabbing the scientist by the throat and shoving him into the nearest wall hissing, “When did this start to ring?” 

“Al…almost as soon as you were gone. Twe…twenty hours maybe? Could you pu…put me do…down please?”

Ronon let go just as John and two Marines grabbed his arms, trying to pull him off the innocent messenger. He spun to look at Elizabeth. When he spoke his voice sounded strained, like he really wanted to do something else entirely. “I need to go through the gate again. Now.”

Dr. Weir crossed her arms in front of her chest, putting on her best oh-no-you-don’t-look. “Why,” she demanded to know.

“I need to.”

“You are not going to leave this city until you slow down and tell me what this is about.”

He stared straight ahead for a few seconds, seeming to consider something before he forced his body to relax. He was still tense but didn’t look like he was going to explode any second now. Instead he held up the still beeping device in his left hand. “I was supposed to meet a friend when this began ringing.”

“You just came back from a mission,” Elizabeth reasoned, “Get a few hours of rest, then you have my okay to go meet your friend.”

Ronon shook his head, making his team worry. It wasn’t like him not to see reason, unless there were Wraith involved. He pulled at his hair, giving a frustrated sigh that made John wonder just who this friend was and why they were so important.

“No. I need to go now. The time frame was twelve hours. She’s probably gone already. If I don’t catch up with her now, I’ll never see her again.”

Rodney frowned from where he’d hidden behind Teyla when things started getting out of hand. “She’s a shy kind of girl?”

The glare he received in return was enough to fry a lesser man where he stood. “She’s been running from the Wraith for longer than I have.”

At that everyone straightened. _Longer than…_ Ronon had stayed out of their grasp for more than seven years. He’d run every single day of those years, never settling anywhere, never resting, never letting down his guard. Even after almost six months free of the Wraith, the usually fearless warrior could sometimes still be found wandering the hallways at night, unable to sleep. To stay still. To have run for longer than that seemed impossible. By the time they had found Ronon there had been little human left about his behaviour. He had been a ruthless machine, killing anything in its wake, caring for nothing and no-one. But even though no-one would ever say it out loud, Ronon had been close to breaking point, close to giving up. To survive what had almost broken him for more than seven years was - 

Elizabeth felt a shudder go through her at the thought, but then her conscious spoke up. No matter how broken or cold this friend of Ronon’s was, they would not sink to the Wraith’s level and leave her on her own when it was well within their power to help her. She turned to the scientist.

“Could you get Dr. Beckett, please?” She gazed at Ronon, “Find your friend. Help her. John, are you fit enough to go out again?”

Like there was even a doubt. “Yes.”

+

Ronon reached the ruins where he’d been supposed to meet his friend a full five minutes before the rest of the team came stumbling into the clearing, wheezing and, in Beckett’s case, cursing everyone who hadn’t helped him carry his kit.

They found their friend frantically searching the area for any sign of life. All he found was a corner in the farthest room, clear of debris and leaves. She’d waited. She’d been here. He felt the same relief wash over him that he always felt every year without fail, when he lay eyes on her and knew that she was still alive. It did however, not help with the guilt he felt at forgetting about their meeting. Sure, there had been a lot going on since he had come to Atlantis, but that was no excuse. 

Not for forgetting Buffy. Never that.

“She’s not here anymore, is she?” John asked as soon as he found Ronon standing in the middle of a caved in-room, staring blankly at one corner. The tall man looked desolate.

“No. But-“ He moved toward the corner he’d been staring at suddenly. John followed him, looking closely, trying to see what his team mate saw. Then he did and…it looked like gibberish to him. It was obviously a message, but not written in any language he had ever seen. 

“You can read this?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say?” He asked empty air. Ronon was already gone and judging by the groaning coming from Rodney and Beckett outside, he was on the move again.

John caught up with Teyla as they were nearing the Stargate. She sounded wistful as she said, “This seems very important to Ronon.”

He looked at her sideways and nodded slowly. “Let’s hope we find her.”

They’d certainly try. If not to give Ronon back his friend, then because no-one, absolutely no-one, deserved that fate.

+

Inside the abandoned ruins two words in an almost forgotten language gleamed in the fading daylight.

 _Year One_.

+

Two hours later the team was nearing the cave Ronon’s friend was supposed to wait for him in. It was apparently the same place they had met during the first of these annual meetings they had going on.

Suddenly Ronon stopped and turned to face John with a serious expression. “I want you to wait here for me to get back.”

A raised eyebrow, “Why?”

“She knows you are here.”

Dr. McKay snorted and kicked up some rotting leaves. “Then why should we wait? If she already knows we’re here that’s a bit useless, don’t you think?”

He earned himself a round of annoyed looks from his team mates, but ignored them. He got them too often to still be offended by them. 

“She doesn’t like guests.”

As John shifted his gun from one hand to the other in order to reach up and scratch his head he wondered just who exactly this woman was. From what little Ronon had let slip, he imagined her to be about six feet tall, built like a linebacker, grumpy, quick with the trigger finger and not what was generally considered friendly company. Well, things could only get better, he thought with a shrug. Besides, he could empathize with her situation. He didn’t think anyone was much for small talk after being captured, tortured, and turned into a chew to by the Wraith.

“We’ll stay.”

He received a curt nod in thanks as well as some more grumbling from their resident genius while one fourth of his team disappeared into the dense forest around them. He snapped at Rodney to shut up, counted to five and a half and motioned for everyone to follow him.

+

Buffy lay in the middle of the cave, one hand behind her head, the other on her gun as she stared at the high ceiling silently. She could feel the nervous energy pumping through her system, demanding that she go out and find out what happened to her lover, but she couldn’t. She’d already broken their agreement by leaving the message and coming here to wait twelve more hours. Javor was dangerous right now. The last culling by the Wraith had been more than fifteen months ago and the villagers were expecting them every day now, looking at the skies in fear. Something she hadn’t found out until after leaving the message, of course, because why should the universe ever cut her any slack. And yet, here she was, anyway.

The first time they’d met here after their one night stand 300 days earlier, she’d promised herself not to get attached because she was Slayer and he was strong, sure, but he was human. The Wraith would get him one day and he would leave her. Better not to let her guard down in the first place. And then he’d spent a full day trying every possible way to worm her real name out of her. It had been so…human, so normal of him, reminding her of times when she actually _had_ a name, instead of a title. 

It had taken five years for her to admit, but now she couldn’t deny it any longer. She’d gotten attached after all. She had one more hour until she had to jump between planets again and only two more safe places she could go, three if she counted their very first meeting place as safe. That gave her, what, thirty-six hours?

Thirty-six hours until she would have to accept that the Wraith had gotten him, that he was dead. It wasn’t enough. 

That was when her FAT started beeping and her spidey-sense tickled down her spine, letting her know that someone was coming closer.

+

Ten minutes after Ronon went ahead, the team found him waiting for them in a small clearing. He glared at them, but didn’t object to their presence again mostly because short of tying them up, there was nothing he could do to keep them away. He didn’t have enough rope to bind and gag them all. So he listened to Rodney’s snarking.

“How does she know we’re coming anyway? I didn’t see anything that indicated that there were sensors in the vicinity and that disgusting wildlife all around us should make it impossible to notice us from any distance.”

“She knows,” Ronon repeated for the fifth time in a suspiciously blank voice. He had gone increasingly monosyllabic the longer they searched for his friend. It was almost like he was slipping into old patterns again, his answers getting shorter, his tone harsher and his overall demeanour was jumpier and edgier.

McKay threw his hands up and howled in frustration, “Yes, but _how_?” 

“I just do.”

The answer came from the tree directly above the frustrated scientist, followed by some rustling leaves and a blonde slip of a woman landing directly in front of Sheppard, who stared stupidly. Ronon’s friend was short, long-haired, green-eyed and absolutely stunning under all that wear and tear. She wore clothes that seemed made for fighting and carried a bag over one shoulder as well as at least six different kinds of weapons, two of which the pilot had never seen before, but seemed much too big for someone that small and skinny.

The blonde stepped around the dumbstruck members of the team and stopped in front of Ronon, hands on hips. She was fairly vibrating with something between relief and irritation that had her clenching her jaw and tightening her hands into fists. It reminded John of a ticking bomb seconds short of exploding and tearing everything around with it to Kingdom Come. Not a comforting image.

“First you’re late and then you bring unannounced guests with you. Didn’t your momma teach you that’s rude?”

“They are friends.”

Everyone felt the temperature drop several degrees as the tiny woman went very still, giving Ronon a look sharp enough to cut diamond. 

“We don’t have friends.” There was a note of steel in her tone that suggested that it was unwise to contradict her as her hands left her waist and moved toward her holstered guns. She was getting ready to kill with no incentive at all. That, more than anything, spoke to John of the way her life was.

“They removed the tracker.”

Her stance faltered for a second and here was a flicker of _something_ behind her cold green eyes, so brief it took John a moment to recognize it. Hope. He couldn’t imagine what it felt like to have something you fought for, for years upon years, drop into your lap suddenly, without warning. He guessed it was too good to be true.

“What did they get in return?”

Armed with his new insight John rested his gun on his shoulder and took a step forward. “I think I can answer that. You see, where I’m from, we have that saying, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.”

She looked him up and down, boots to hair line and back, eyes flickering briefly at the sight of the flag on his shoulder before asking, “Is he?”

Whatever she would have said next never let her mouth as the bracer on her left arm suddenly started blinking like a Christmas tree. She didn’t even look at it before announcing, “Several Wraith darts just passed through the gate. They are in full culling mode.”

Everybody tensed. They needed to get off the planet if they didn’t want to end up as a snack and they needed to do it _now_! There was no time for long winded explanations and arguments with the woman they were trying to save.

Rodney yelped as he caught the high pitched whine of the darts in the distance. They had only a few more minutes, five tops.

+

Buffy checked her data with a few concentrated thoughts and came up with much the same results. The nearest village was miles away and filled to burst with food, but sooner or later the darts would catch the signal of the tracker embedded in her back. They would come, their culling beams would catch them and she would be a prisoner once more, treated like a toy, a game. She would be back in that hell, and she’d rather be dead.

She looked at Ronon and found him staring straight her. Their gazes locked and Buffy took a deep breath and a leap of faith after eight years of living without it. She trusted Ronon, trusted him with the only thing she still had left to give. Her life.

“Do it.”

+

+

**Part Two**

+

Everyone blinked at the blonde as she threw her bag to the ground, followed by two guns and her shirt. She stood in the middle of the small clearing they were on, with nothing but a strip of cloth wrapped around her chest once and knotted behind her back to keep her decent. She pulled a long dagger out of her left boot and used it to pin her long braid up, revealing a mound of scar tissue in the same place Ronon had his own. It was a move that would have left most people with a new haircut, but she did it with ease before clarifying, “Remove that damn thing. We have five minutes, ten if we’re lucky and they didn’t catch the signal from the tracker right away.”

Dr. Beckett took a step forward and spoke for the first time since they had stopped their wild cross-country chase. He shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, but we can’t remove the tracker like this. It’s embedded in your nerves and too close to your spine for me to do anything right now. If we had an hour... but not like this. You’d probably end up paralyzed or worse. You’ll have to come to back with us.”

She moved so fast it was impossible to follow, but when she stopped moving, Buffy had her gun pointed straight at Teyla’s head. She’d made up her mind in a move that she would smack anyone else for. She wasn’t going to back down. Not now that she could see her goal in front of her, closer than ever before.

“I’m not leaving this planet with that goddamned fucking tracker inside of me. I’m done running. Do it.”

She pulled a knife out of nowhere, wiped it on her pants and held it out to the doctor, handle first. Then she turned, presenting her back to him without lowering her gun away from its aim. Beckett didn’t move. Ronon gave her a pointed look, receiving a minute nod in response, and lifted his own gun to point at Rodney.

“Do it,” he echoed, ignoring McKay’s irritating screeching.

Beckett looked at Sheppard.

+

Ronon lowered his gun now that his point was made and stepped up to where Buffy stood, offering her something to lean against. Then they waited for Beckett to move. He didn’t. Finally Buffy lost her patience. Her FAT kept blinking, screaming alarm in her head and the low humming of the darts coming closer did nothing to soothe her frayed nerves as her whole body was screaming at her to either run or get in a position to fight, not stand in the open, vulnerable and visible. It went against every single instinct she had carefully honed over the last eight years.

“Look, I know you swore that oath and all that, but I don’t fucking care about your morals right now! Cripple me or kill your team with your hesitation. Your choice, Doc.” It was probably a cruel thing to do, putting all the responsibility on the doctor like that, especially since he was trying to help her, but she’d made up her mind. She’d either walk through the gate a free woman or die trying. Right now, it looked like the latter was more likely to happen. She tapped her foot impatiently.

Beckett risked a quick glance at Sheppard, who stood glued to the spot, watching, face expressionless. He gave a short nod. Carson lifted the knife with quivering hands and Slayer could feel the cool metal pressing against her skin. There was a sting when he broke through and then the familiar feeling of warm blood running in rivulets down her back set in. He gave his patient a moment to scream or cry, but she did neither. 

Runner, he reminded himself, she was a Runner. She had to be used to pain. Pain much worse than a shallow cut in the back. Then, muttering some Athosian curses that made Teyla blush prettily, he pried the liberally bleeding cut open with his fingers and started digging for the tracker as fast as he could, trying to get it over with for all their sakes.

Still, fingers and a hunting knife weren’t likely to do her – they still hadn’t been told her name – much good. If he didn’t cripple her, he’d at least leave her with an infection that might kill her. And to think that she was forcing him to do this. A bullet to the head was a faster way to die.

His grumbling stopped abruptly as his fingers happened upon something smooth and slippery. He pulled - causing her to hiss - and knew he had found the hated piece of technology inside her body. He gave it some experimental tugs that made Rodney turn a bit green around the edges and she finally lowered her gun. Nobody moved. It seemed they all agreed that she had never meant to go through with her threat. She’d just needed to convince him to cripple her, damn stubborn woman! And he’d thought Ronon was bad.

Finally there was no choice but to pull up sharply and cut the tracker free in one swift but incredibly painful movement.

+

John watched as Carson dug around in the woman’s back like nobody’s business and he had to admit that it looked gruesome. But more shocking was that fact that the ‘patient’ didn’t react at all. She hissed once and exhaled sharply as the tracker came free. Her head dropped forward to rest on Ronon’s chest. He wrapped an arm around her and held her wordlessly as her gun slipped from her fingers. Then he took the tracker from Carson, dropped it and pulverized it under the heel of his boot a grim smile of satisfaction on his face even as his friend’s blood stained his hands.

She remained standing. It was obvious that Ronon’s support was more of a psychological than a physical nature and John wondered what a human being had to go through to be able to take pain like that. And yet he knew better than to feel pity for the woman leaning against his friend. She didn’t need it and if Ronon’s state of mind after they’d removed his tracker was anything to go by, then she didn’t want or understand compassion either. For her, every day was war and weak people had no place on the battlefield. 

He didn’t pity her, but he still felt sorry for her. She looked like she would have made a nice cheerleader, or maybe even a good mother and wife in another life and another place. 

Suddenly Carson gave an inarticulate yell and jumped backward, away from Buffy and Ronon so fast that he stumbled and landed on his ass. Still he kept moving, scrambling to get away from whatever had him spooked like this. Everyone had their guns up and were looking around for the threat when he finally stopped against a tree trunk and wheezed, “What are you?”

He looked at the still nameless woman in Ronon’s arms as he asked. 

Sheppard whirled around to follow the arm Carson was pointing and immediately his eyes fell on the open wound on her back. 

A wound that was barely bleeding anymore. In fact as he watched, the cut stopped bleeding altogether and even started closing. He gaped stupidly at the couple standing in the middle of the clearing. They were both ignoring the looks directed their way.

+

Buffy breathed through the pain, concentrating instead on Ronon’s arms around her after a whole year of not getting touched by anyone except in a fight. It was heaven. Or rather, it was heaven until the dear doctor noticed the rapid rate at which she was healing and screamed bloody murder.

It had taken her a fair while to notice, but she had eventually caught on to the fact that with every injury she was dealt, her healing sped up until she healed within minutes. But she paid a price for accelerated healing powers. The re-knitting of bones and tissue at this rate was not as painless as Hollywood wanted people to believe. In fact, it hurt worse than some of the original injuries did. It had started after her resurrection, when she’d fought Willow for hours without tiring, but she hadn’t really noticed until the first Turok-Han had gotten a hold of her. By rights, she should have been dead then, but she wasn’t.

After that, every single cut, bruise and broken bone had healed just a bit faster than the last one. It was the reason why she’d made the doc cut her up like this. Within a few minutes she would be healed enough to get moving again and any nerve damage he dealt her would be gone within days, weeks at the most, too. She would leave the planet without a way for the Wraith to track her anymore, putting no-one in any danger. Explaining that to Ronon’s new friends would have taken a lot longer than they had, especially since they seemed to be from Earth. The people native to this galaxy were a lot more likely to accept things without understanding them completely. They had more faith and less science.

“You’re a Wraith!”

Before Buffy could open her mouth, Ronon sent his famed death glare at Rodney and spat, “The only Wraith thing has just been removed in front of your eyes. Think before you open your mouth!”

Buffy smiled weakly into his chest. There was no greater insult to him that being compared to that which he hated most and he seemed to include her in that. It was actually kind of cute. 

Finally the searing pain in her back faded to a dull throb that still left her uncomfortable, but able to fight. 

She lifted her face to Ronon’s and pressed a quick kiss to his chin to catch his attention before ordering, “Help a girl, would you?” 

She received only a nod in return before Ronon carefully let go of her, making sure she wouldn’t stumble without him. Everyone else was watching the two of them interact, finally putting some pieces together. Namely, that Slayer wasn’t just a ‘friend’ and that he’d known how fast she healed. He bent and picked up her discarded things, throwing her the gun. She caught it deftly, wincing at the strain it put on the tender skin of her back. Then she used it to point at her FAT.

“All this beeping and blinking means that they’re still around, you know? If we don’t get moving now, we’re dead. And even I can’t heal dead.”

With that she turned around and took off into the trees at a fast jog, heading toward the Stargate with Ronon following suit. The SGA team exchanged some confused looks before shrugging and following with mild sighs. If they didn’t keep up or worse, died now, they’d never get their answers. 

For once, Rodney was ahead of everyone else.

+

Teyla reached the edge of the woods last, the humming of the dart engines not far behind her. The vicinity of the Wraith on top of that was giving her a nasty headache. She knelt beside the woman that had been introduced as Slayer somewhere along the way.  
“We can not deal out while the Wraith keep the gate active from the other side. We’re stuck.”

Slayer spoke with her eyes closed, an amused little smile on her face, “When the gate shuts down, you run. You’ve got thirty seconds before I shut it down again.”

There was some gaping on the Atlantians’ part while Rodney rolled his eyes and announced, “Look lady, no matter how cool your name is, it is impossible to shut an active gate down from the incoming side of the wormhole!”

Slayer opened her eyes to give him a scathing look, one eyebrow raised. It eerily reminded the people from Earth of a certain former First Prime. 

“You have the gene,” she said, pointing at the hand held device Rodney was still fiddling with, “Of course it’s possible.” Her voice was dismissive, making it clear what she thought of him. 

Then she turned her gaze back toward the Stargate and with a snap of blue energy it closed. A scant second later the slow grinding sound of the gate dialling anew could be heard.

“Twenty five,” Slayer chirped as she jumped to her feet and took off in the opposite direction, drawing the single Wraith dart meant to protect the gate away from it.

+

Elizabeth Weir was pacing the gate room impatiently, waiting for her best team to return home with an either injured or tracker-implanted woman. A woman that was probably a stone cold killer and if she was anything like Ronon she would be acting like a cornered animal upon arriving in a foreign environment where she was at a disadvantage. It was a security risk that threatened to boggle the scientist’s mind, or would have if she hadn’t trusted every single of the five people that had gone to fetch Ronon’s friend. But they had already been gone for more than five hours. They should have been back in less than three. Which meant they had probably run into trouble.

Usually Elizabeth would calm herself in such a situation by walking into the infirmary and warning Beckett that he might get some visitors. The walking and warning gave her a purpose and made her feel less useless. This time however, Beckett was part of the people she was worried for and that didn’t bode well. So she paced.

She was about to finish her thirty-sixth round of the gate room when the shouting and blinking that signalled an incoming wormhole started. 

“Do we know who it is?”

She received a yelled, “No,” from one of the people manning the controls, “The shield is blocked! We can’t-“

Whatever he had been about to say was abruptly cut off by none other than Dr. Rodney McKay tumbling out of the Stargate with a yell. He was closely followed – and almost hit – by Beckett and his equipment. John looked a bit more dignified as he landed in a roll and quickly jumped up again, clearing the space in front of the gate for Teyla who came running through followed by some debris and Ronon. The last one through the gate was the one Elizabeth had been waiting for. 

She was blonde and tiny and came flying in much like John had, only she didn’t get up after her roll, but stayed flat on her back in front of the gate, which promptly shut down again. For a moment everyone in the room was completely silent as they watched the new comers pick themselves up from the floor – everyone except the blonde. John noticed the questioning looks he was getting and shrugged, “Wraith.”

Then he walked over to the new comer and softly poked her in the thigh with his foot, “You alright down there? We didn’t save you just so you can die now, you know?”

Her guns were aimed steadily at his head as she growled but made no move to get up, “You didn’t save me and how do you think I feel after getting surgery and running from he Wraith with you lot riding on my coat tails all-” she was abruptly cut off by an ominous rumble from below.

Elizabeth frowned at her technicians, dimly aware of Rodney already jogging up there and starting to order people around, trying to figure out what the problem with the city was. His eyes widened as he reached the first screen and checked what was on it.

“What is happening?”

McKay frowned, “The energy output is rising throughout the city for no reason. Systems we switched off are booting themselves and – hey, did you know there’s another secret lab behind the living quarters and- wow!”

The city, seemingly unimpressed by Rodney’s discovery, was positively humming with energy everyone knew they didn’t have to spare. The lights got brighter, consoles started blinking wildly and more and more systems and programs began booting themselves, all in the space of a few seconds. Rodney’s eyes got wider and wider, John and Teyla were looking around frantically, looking for a foe that wasn’t there, and Elizabeth had trouble staying upright, the city was rumbling so hard.

“I can’t stop it, it won’t do what I say! The city is going completely mad!”

“It’s a she.”

The correction was spoken so calmly and quietly it almost didn’t carry over the din of people scrambling to direct the city back to what it was supposed to do and nothing more. Once more, everybody halted and turned to stare at the newcomer. She had sat up and was glaring at Rodney, “The city is a she.”

Then she put both her hands flat on the ground as a slow smile spread over her face she whispered, “It’s alright girl, I know you’re happy to see me, but you’ve got to calm down before you give all those geeks a stroke.” There was a moment of silence before a snort escaped her and she nodded, “Yeah, I’ll tell the head geek to stop being so mean to you.”

And then, just like that, everything went back to normal and the blonde slowly climbed to her feet. Upon looking around she found everyone staring at her. She turned to Ronon. 

“Why’s everyone staring at me?”

“They didn’t know the city was sentient.”

“Then how do they use all the technology round here?”

Elizabeth saw this as a chance to get a word in edgewise, “Those with the gene activate the needed equipment and the rest of us uses it.”

The blonde wrinkled her nose cutely, which didn’t match the rest of her ragged and tough-as-nails look. “That’s stupid. If you got what it takes to work with the technology, why don’t you use it?”

Rodney was there suddenly, beside Teyla, pointing at the woman now resting her head against Ronon’s shoulder. She looked tired suddenly, although John had the impression that she was hiding her true state of exhaustion. Either she was a lot more knackered than she admitted and couldn’t keep up the façade or, what he thought was more likely, she wasn’t all that exhausted and simply putting on a mask to protect herself from interrogation. She was tricky, that one, and slippery like water.

“That’s how you activated the gate without dialling!” He turned to Elizabeth. “She seems to be controlling the gate the same way Sheppard navigates the Puddle Jumpers, simply by concentrating!! It never occurred to me that the gates and the city itself might work the same way! This is-”

“Boring geek speak? Yeah.”

John snorted, he liked Ronon’s friend, despite their less than stellar first meeting. 

Elizabeth kindly interrupted before McKay could explode. “What’s your name?”

Slayer shrugged and introduced herself, earning a few raised eyebrows from those that had not seen her in action on the planet they’d found her on. The mental image of her skin re-knitting itself over a shiny piece of spine that glistened in the dappled sunlight was not something either of the team were going to get out of their heads anytime soon. 

“Are you planning to stay with us?”

Another shrug, “I don’t know.”

Ronon nudged her until she looked up at him and asked, “Do you have anywhere to be?” 

She shook her head, “No.”

“So?”

Slayer took a step away from him and looked at Weir, “You’re the boss here, right?”

She received a nod in return.

“I’m a fighter. I’m stubborn as hell and I like to kill things. I don’t play well with others, and I detest authority. If you sneak up on me, chances are you won’t do it again. I’m not a nice person and I’m damn grumpy in the morning before I get my breakfast, as Ronon can testify. If you can accept all that, I’m in.”

Elizabeth took a moment to parse that. Then she extended her hand.

“Welcome to Atlantis.”

+

As soon as the words were out of Elizabeth’s mouth, Rodney demanded that she walk with him through the city and try to activate different devices that he and his team of scientists had categorized as broken. He also seemed to be planning for Beckett to find a way to isolate what made her ATA gene different from everyone else’s. 

“Let’s start with the Jumpers,” Elizabeth heard her Head of Science order in his typically hyperactive, I-just-discovered-something-big voice. When their new friend didn’t move he tried to grab her arm and pull her along. In a move too fast to follow, Slayer spun out of his grip, grabbed his arm and twisted in behind his back with enough force to make even Ronon wince in sympathy. 

Then she leaned in close and hissed, “You ever touch me again without my permission, I’ll use that arm to beat you to death with. I’m injured, I’m tired and I don’t like people touching me. Besides, the Jumpers are the other way. So, are we clear?”

“Yes we – ow – we’re – ow, would you stop that – owowowow – yes, alright, YES, we’re clear. Really clear. OW! Let go!”

She released him as fast as she’d grabbed him and the whole team watched for a moment as Rodney rubbed his wrist and tried to glare at his tormenter. She didn’t look very intimidated.

Suddenly the Doctor perked up, “How do you know which way the Jumpers are?”

She looked at him strangely for a moment before asking, “You really can’t hear her, can you?”

“Sheppard is the one who works the technology fastest and even he can’t hear anything.”

“That explains why she’s so lonely,” Buffy remarked with the first hint of emotion in her voice since she had arrived, before cocking her head to one side and listening intently to something only she could hear. After a moment her eyes refocused on McKay. “She says it’s because the gene you all carry is diluted. Too many generations in between. Now excuse me, I’ve got some sleep to catch.”

She walked up to Ronon, grabbed his hand and attempted to leave the gate room with him. The key word being _attempted_ because suddenly Beckett jumped into their way with an exclamation of, “You belong in the infirmary.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do!”

“No.”

“You are injured, you said so yourself.”

“No. Infirmary.” 

“But you-” Carson was abruptly cut off by Slayer’s exasperated cry of, “Dex!”

Beside her Ronon stood a little straighter and asked silkily, “You rang?” In that moment, John knew he would be chewed through and spat out by the doctor later for introducing Ronon to Earth’s version of entertainment.

“Is there a shower around here somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a bed near said shower?” 

“Yes.”

“Then we have a date, let’s go.”

+

As soon as they left the room, Elizabeth turned to her military counterpart and asked, “Do you think we made the right decision by letting her stay?”

John grinned as he ran a hand through his hair idly. “She knows how to keep Rodney in check. In my book that makes her my new best friend.”

Weir shook her head in wry amusement, a small smile tugging at her lips. 

+

After the shower Ronon bundled Buffy into a fluffy towel and carried her over to his bed. He knew just how much healing took out of her and even if she didn’t admit to it, he could see the small signs of distress in her. Maybe because he’d exhibited them himself not so long ago. Within a single day, Sheppard and his team had turned both their lives upside down by removing the trackers from their backs. It was a strange feeling to stop and stay still after so many years of running, always running. 

He tugged the sheets down and laid her on the bed. As he stepped back with the towel in hand he caught her small smile of gratitude and returned one of his own. He knew who this woman was, knew the reason she was called Slayer. He’d seen her kill and slaughter, cutting down anything and anyone in her path. She was cold, uncaring and unfeeling around everyone. Everyone but him. Ronon knew how hard it was to let your guard down sometimes, to be human after acting like little more than an animal for so long. He understood the effort it took her just to let him touch her when she was defenseless. 

And he knew that he was the only one to ever see her smile like this. He was the only one she shared her greatest and deepest secret with. The secret that she had a heart. 

He dropped the towels in his hand and around his waist and crawled into bed beside her, pulling the sheets over both of them. For a while they just lay facing each other, without saying a word. Then, slowly, Buffy inched forward until the tip of her nose was touching his. She pressed a slow but chaste kiss to his lips before pulling back a few inches and starting to toy with the pendant dangling from the leather strap around his neck. She didn’t look him in the eye when she whispered, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

He stopped her nervous hand by wrapping one of his own around it and both of them spent a moment staring at the way their joint hands looked together.

“And I’m glad you’re here.”

She smiled as she relaxed her hand in his hold, “Yeah, me too.”

It was probably the closest they were ever going to get to expressing their feelings, but that was alright. Five minutes later, Buffy was out like a light.

+

+

**Part Three**

+

Within the next couple of days, most people, especially Ronon’s team made an effort to be nice to Buffy and include her in things. Teyla talked to her about the little things going on, Sheppard kept questioning her about weapons and ships. Rodney and Beckett fought over her almost daily. Carson kept insisting that she needed a thorough check up and McKay kept trying to drag her off for some obscure projects. Both of them and almost everybody else kept touching her casually and the two docs kept trying to physically drag her someplace or another. Rodney especially, seemed to have forgotten what she’d threatened him with on her first day.

They treated Buffy like she was a part of their group, a regular person, a member of their expedition. They treated her like a friend. It made Slayer’s skin prickle and itch. She wasn’t used to so many people around, wasn’t used to any physical contact that did not involve pain of some kind, unless it came from Ronon. Nor was she used to making conversation with anyone but him. Every time someone touched her or tried to make small talk, the Slayer inside her rose to the surface whispering in her ear to lunge across the table and rip the head off the poor guy on the other side.

Somewhere, her sixteen-year-old self was crying in a corner over what she’d become.

Constantly there was talk about, “what Ronon did when he came here”. Ronon was no woman that got groped everywhere he went and Ronon had no supernatural creature slumbering in his lizardbrain. Ronon was not more animal than human sometimes and Ronon still had some ruins of his old life to cling and go back to from time to time. But most of all, Ronon didn’t have inhuman senses that picked up on everything that happened for fifty feet around and Atlantis was not humming her childish joy at finally having company again in his ear. 

Long story short: All the humanity around her was slowly eroding away the thin veneer that had once called itself Buffy, revealing what lay beneath, revealing Slayer. The problem was that no-one seemed to realize the danger. So Slayer decided it was time to act, time to make it clear where she stood and what she was.

People called her Slayer but they forgot the meaning of the word. Slayer meant Killer and to forget that in her presence would mean death sooner or later because one of these days when someone put a friendly hand on her shoulder she was simply going to tear it off before she realized it. 

She liked Ronon’s new friends and she liked his new home, but people had to respect the warning labels she came with, these days.

It was on the fifth day that Slayer flirted with and teased five Marines into sparring with her. She made sure to provoke them around noon, when she knew Teyla and Sheppard were in the training room. Weir and Rodney tended to watch them when they had the time to spare and she simply told Ronon to be there.

The fight, once it had started was over almost too fast to follow. Buffy didn’t bother pulling her punches, she just didn’t aim to kill. Within seconds all five of her opponents, some twice her size and trice her weight, were on the ground, motionless. Two had broken noses, one several cracked ribs and one a broken leg. All of them were badly bruised. The training room looked like a sight straight out of a war zone. But the most horrifying thing was not the Marines, it was Slayer standing in the middle of all the carnage, barely breathing hard, blood not her own dripping from her left hand. Except for that, she seemed completely untouched by what she’d just done as she turned and left the room without a word, leaving shock in her wake.

As the Marines were taken away and the order to find their guest was shouted at some hapless guards, Weir turned on Ronon with fury in her eyes, “You said she was no danger! She just beat five of my best men into a pulp without provocation! That is not ‘not dangerous’!”

She was angry at herself, for letting a complete stranger into her city without knowing anything about her. Hell, she hadn’t even submitted to the basic health check all new comers went through. Yes, the blonde woman had talked a good talk upon her arrival and Sheppard stuck with his ‘enemy of my enemy’ approach, but she should have kept a closer eye, should have asked more questions, should have seen the danger. And kicked the other woman the hell out of her city before she did – this! 

Ronon, spending most of his free time with the newcomer, was a welcome target for her ire, but he didn’t rise to the bait. That wasn’t why he lingered after Buffy left the room. He stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, arms crossed in front of his chest. He didn’t necessarily agree with what Buffy had done but he understood that she thought it was needed. He understood that when Buffy thought something was necessary, she would do it, no matter what he said. She’d been alone for too long, in this galaxy and her home, to really rely on people. She might ask his opinion, but it was a long way to go until she actually listened to his answer. 

She was feeling pressured and trapped, so she lashed out. She’d done it under controlled circumstances, she’d pulled her punches and she’d stopped. It was more than he’d expected, to be honest. He’d come here fully prepared to have to wade into the mess and pull her off the men.

So he watched Weir yell herself hoarse at him before he snapped a single word straight in her face, “Slayer.”

“What about her!?”

“The word has a meaning. It’s more than a name.” He waved a hand at the room at large, shrugged. “Give her time. Give her space. She’s a lot worse off than I was.”

Then he walked out of the room in search of his lover.

+

He found her on top of one of the highest towers, leaning against the roof, staring into the cloudy sky. Her face was suspiciously blank and on anyone else, he would have expected tears.

“You didn’t have to do this.”

“Yes I did. They didn’t understand.”

“Who you are?”

“What I am.”

He dropped down beside her, careful not to touch her and turned his glance out towards the ocean. “Why is this so important to you? Why now?”

She shrugged, still not meeting his gaze. “They have to know Slayer before they can meet Buffy. I can’t let my guard down around people who don’t know how to handle me.”

“Why now,” Ronon repeated, turning to look at her.

She met his gaze, seeming a bit startled at how close he was, or maybe at his question. “They’re your friends,” she explained like it was obvious, “This is your home. I want to…I want….” Finally she shook her head and snorted at her own inability to express her feelings. “I’m not good at this shit, Ronon, please don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

She glared. He blinked innocently at her. She tried to slap him on the arm, but missed as he jerked back.

“Say that I want to get along with those people because they belong to you and I want them to like me. Alright? Are you happy now? I said it. Buffy the monster wants to be loved.” She turned away from him, giving him her back in helpless anger and while she stared across the ocean she wistfully remembered a time when she’d known how to express her feelings and how to make friends. More than eight years. She wondered if they still thought of her sometimes, if they missed her every once in a while when her birthday came around, or when they talked about the past. Maybe it was a stupid idea to want to stay in Atlantis. A stupid idea to want to reclaim everything ‘Buffy’ once meant. Slayer was better. Slayer was _easy_.

Wanting only ever got her hurt. It was stupid.

_Just as stupid at getting attached to Ronon, right? And you’ve done that as well._

She felt a pair of strong arms slowly wind around her waist, giving her the chance to protest and pull away. She didn’t. Instead she relaxed and leaned back into the embrace, wishing for the first time in years that she could still cry.

“It’s just hard, you know? Being human.”

A low chuckle rumbled in her left ear followed by, “Yeah, I know.”

+

After the Slayer-Incident as it was quickly dubbed, everyone walked on eggshells around Buffy for a while. 

But when they realized that without provocation, Slayer was not going to blow up, they gradually relaxed, although most people still made an effort not to touch her unless it couldn’t be avoided. They were, by and large, a military operation and the soldiers knew how to interpret the brute show of strength. It made them cautious and, when it proved to be an isolated incident, they filed it away under ‘things to remember’ next to ‘when McKay loses his shit, find Sheppard’, ‘don’t bet against Teyla’ and ‘never go unarmed, we get invaded far too often’. They moved on. 

In return, Buffy let some of her, well, _Buffyness_ shine through, now that she wasn’t constantly crowded and on edge anymore. She even spent an evening or two with Teyla, doing girly things and she watched football with John. One night, almost a month after her arrival, even found her playing poker with the Marines she’d beaten up. They guilt-ed her into playing strip poker with them after a few drinks until Ronon decided she’d had enough fun and dragged her off to bed where he spent several hours helping her work off her alcohol-induced energy. It was a satisfying night for all parties involved.

Only Elizabeth seemed to have a hard time forgiving the incident. She kept a cool distance toward Buffy and in extension, Ronon, unable to forgive that men under her command had been hurt in what she saw as an unnecessary display of violence. 

Sheppard had tried to explain it to her once, but it had boiled down to, “So basically, she beat them up so she wouldn’t accidentally beat them up,” at which point she’d thrown up her arms and announced, “We do not beat people up at all!” and marched out.

She deferred to the military commander on the issue, but if it had been up to her, she would have gotten rid of the other woman before the marines made it out of the infirmary.

+

A whole two months after the Incident, Elizabeth was walking the hallways of Atlantis in the middle of the night. She thought about what had happened recently, namely Michael. The Wraith turned human, their experiment, their miracle and now their downfall. The second Beckett had come up with the plan, Slayer had told them no, followed a close second by Ronon. Both of them had refused to aid in capturing Michael and playing the game the rest of Atlantis’ crew had come up with in order to try and integrate Michael into human society.

And just like they had prophesised, everything had gone completely wrong. Michael had rejoined the Wraith with the information that Atlantis still existed. Any day now, a hive would pop up on their deep space radar, of that Elizabeth was sure. And what would happen then…

She was torn out of her morbid thoughts by the soft _swoosh_ of a door opening and closing and upon looking up she found a sheepish looking Slayer standing only a few feet away in front of Ronon’s door. It was a strange look on the blonde woman’s face, but it made her look decidedly harmless and a lot younger than she usually looked. Not that anyone had ever managed to worm her age out of her and her face didn’t give away much. It seemed timeless, frozen somewhere between twenty and forty.

“Up so late?” Elizabeth asked, maybe a bit more snidely than necessary.

“Sneaking back to my room,” Slayer replied, her voice bland.

Elizabeth frowned, “Why don’t you just move in with Ronon? Everyone knows you’re together and you spend most of your time in there anyway.” She’d wondered why Buffy insisted on a room of her own ever since the Slayer had requested it after the first night in the city, but never managed to ask. Now the blonde just shrugged and said, “It’s a long story.”

Determined not to let this chance pass, the older of the two women nodded, “Let’s find some coffee then.”

+

Buffy watched out of the corner of her eye as Elizabeth walked beside her toward the canteen. The other woman looked nervous and angry, still. Probably because she still couldn’t seem to swallow the Slayer-Incident. It was the only reason Buffy had agreed to have a talk in the middle of the night, really. She didn’t need an enemy here, not while she was trying to make this place home. Besides, she’d been a bit unfriendly toward the scientist over the whole Michael business.

And to think, she’d once been good at people. 

The two women settled on a window seat, each with a giant mug of coffee in front of them. Buffy decided that she was going to be the one to start.

“It has a lot to do with the Incident, you know?”

“What has?”

Slayer chuckled, “The reason I still have my own room is the same thing that made me beat up the boyos.”

It was a visible process, the stiffening of Elizabeth’s back, the thinning of her lips and the clenching of her hands around her mug. Her voice was as cold as it ever got as she snapped, “And that would be?”

Buffy leaned back, refusing to add to the anger in the room. Someone had to be reasonable and if the Head of Atlantis refused to, well, then Buffy would. She took a sip of her coffee, strong enough to wake the dead, before taking a deep breath and explaining, “When I got here I told you what I am. I told you not to touch me, not to crowd me, that I wasn’t good with,” she waved a hand to encompass all of Atlantis. “You listened, you agreed and you didn’t understand at all what I was talking about, did you?”

The brunette blinked, not knowing what to say. Luckily, Slayer didn’t seem to expect or need an answer. “You didn’t. No-one here did. Once upon a time, I might have explained, but I’m not that good with the talking stuff anymore, if you’ve noticed.” She grimaced. “I’ve been making myself into something deadly since I was fifteen years old. If you’ve got a loaded gun, you don’t leave it lying round in the open and invite people to test the trigger. It’d be careless. By treating me like I was one of you, someone who isn’t dangerous, you did just that. You played with the trigger and I was about to go off. So I pulled the trigger myself under controlled circumstances and showed you what damage the gun could cause. Not my best show, I’ll admit, but then, I’m a bit screwed up these days. My plans used to be a lot less bloody, in hindsight. And now you hate me.” 

There was a long silence between the two women as Elizabeth tried to assimilate all the information she’d been dealt and found herself wondering if words would have been enough. Her coffee was only lukewarm by the time she came to the decision that, no, she had needed to see with her own two eyes what happened when someone pulled the trigger on this particular gun. She remembered that within ten minutes of arriving, Slayer had had Rodney by the proverbial balls, telling him never to touch her again without permission. The warning hadn’t lasted longer than a day.

And even if they had listened, they hadn’t taken her seriously. She was tiny, fluffy and had too big eyes for anyone to equate her with danger the way they did Ronon at first glance. And it had worked. The things Elizabeth was still angry about even now were exactly the things the smaller woman had meant to convey. 

They’d treated her too familiarly, let her in too easily, based on Ronon’s trust in her. They’d let their guard down after all their worries about how damaged, how feral another runner would be. That’s not how you reintroduced someone to polite society. God knew how much worse that fallout might have been if someone had managed to give the blonde woman a full on PTSD flashback.

Still, “but those Marines are my men. I may not be their direct CO, but they’re my responsibility and I can’t let you walk around, beating up my people.”

Slayer chuckled, “They’ve forgiven me a long time ago, you know that, right?”

Elizabeth blinked. She hadn’t known that. 

“Yeah. It involved alcohol, strip poker and some not so subtle flirting on their part. Very manly way of making up and we all had one hell of a hangover. But we’re good. Think you can forgive me now?”

Instead of answering the question, the scientist decided to counter with one of her own. “What does that have to do with your own room?”

She received another of those infuriating shrugs that didn’t tell her _anything_. In combination with Slayer’s blank face, they were about as expressive as a white wall. “Do you know the scar on Ronon’s left forearm? Going from his wrist almost to his elbow, very straight and deep?”

It took her a second, but the brunette remembered seeing it before and wondering what left such wounds. She nodded, “It looks like a knife wound.”

“It is. I had a nightmare. He touched me on accident. He was bleeding all over both of us before I was fully awake.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth but quickly shut it again. In the two months Slayer had been with them, she’d never opened up to anyone and now she was making a real effort to make peace. The older woman was not stupid enough to ruin this with some random comment.

“You’re afraid of hurting him.”

“So, think you can forgive me now?” She repeated her earlier question, completely changing the subject and Elizabeth knew that she couldn’t avoid an answer anymore. She’d been given a lot in the last thirty minutes and it was time she returned a bit of it.

“Yes.”

The smile that split the other woman’s face was the first genuine one she had ever seen and it lit her whole face up.

“My name’s Buffy, by the by,” she offered after a moment.

It was Elizabeth’s turn to smile widely now. She understood the gesture perfectly well. “That’s a short form of Elizabeth, isn’t it?”

Buffy - funny name that, but it fit the woman she might have been under different circumstances - snorted, “Yeah. It is.”

+

Three weeks later everything was falling apart. The Wraith were coming with a hive ship and Atlantis had no notable defences beside some new drones and a half working Ancient ship they’d found the week before. The Daedalus was pretty much useless since the Wraith had found a way to block the Asgard technology used to beam bombs on board their hives.

Everyone, without exception, was working themselves ragged trying to find something, _anything_ that would be useful, but so far they made no progress at all. It seemed hopeless and they only had twenty-two hours left until the calculated arrival of the hive and their subsequent annihilation. It was enough to set even the usually stoic couple of Buffy and Ronon on edge.

In fact, Elizabeth suspected that half the nervous energy in the city was generated by the two of them alone. Their initial grim glee at having prophesised this exact event had quickly faded, leaving them both taut as a spring. Buffy was currently pacing the gate room her hands twitching occasionally like they were itching for a weapon, for something to _break_. The rage boiling just below the surface was visible in every step she took and her expression screamed murder. She reminded Elizabeth of a caged animal pacing behind bars, ready to bust out and tear something limb from limb. 

No matter how insensitive, everyone in the city made a point of moving out of the way when Slayer came walking toward them. They all felt the wall of aggression and violence around her and none wished to collide with it.

Ronon, while not pacing, wasn’t much better. He barely talked, was quick to anger and didn’t work well with others. But, overall, he still seemed more in control than his lover. He was less _wild_. Elizabeth stood, watching them both from the control room, not faulting them for their behaviour at all. The enemy, their greatest nightmare, the thing they both hated with every fibre of their beings was coming, and they were waiting for it like sheep to the slaughter when they were supposed to be wolves. A predator made prey was not a nice thing to watch.

She jumped a bit as John stepped up beside her. He looked tired, with dark bruises under his eyes and his usually perky hair hanging in his face. He leaned against the railing and followed his colleague’s gaze toward a pacing Slayer.

He sighed, “We have to stop her. Half the base is more scared of her than of the Wraith. Rodney already broke two mugs today, he’s so nervous in her presence. She’s a time bomb.”

Elizabeth shrugged without looking at him, “But can you fault her for it? I can’t imagine how they must both feel.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

+

Their conversation was cut off abruptly when Ronon, who’d been sitting close by, climbed to his feet, shoulders tight. It was the first time he’d moved in hours and everyone in the vicinity stopped whatever they were doing to watch him as he walked up to the two leaders conversing at the railing. He moved straight past them, jumping down into the gate room, disregarding the stairs a few feet off to one side.

More people stopped their work to watch as he slowly made his way into the middle of the circular room, where he stopped. Right in Buffy’s path. He stood with his feet slightly spread, rolling neck. Buffy sidestepped his big form with ease, not paying attention to him as she kept pacing. She never saw his fist coming until it hit her square in the face, turning her head with the force of the punch.

+

Upstairs in the control room Rodney dropped the third mug of the day and even the most oblivious scientist laid down their work in complete silence.

+

For a very long moment Buffy stayed as she was, head turned to the side, hair flung wildly across her face. Then she turned to look at Ronon, who stood two feet away from her, his face a study in emptiness.

+

Elizabeth asked, without turning away from the display, “What is going on?”

John replied in kind, snorting quietly, “Looks like someone’s doing our job of distracting her.”

“By beating her up?”

He chuckled, “I don’t think we could beat her up.”

“So we leave them be?” She cringed at the thought, but something needed to be done before the Wraith arrived and everyone surrendered just to get away from Slayer. 

John seemed to agree with her. “We leave them be.”

+

Buffy moved first by taking a step to the left as they started circling each other. And they circled and circled and circled and circled and then suddenly Ronon jumped forward, intent on slamming his fist into her face. Again. Buffy dove out of the way and ducked around him, kicking him in the knee as she passed.

+

Up in the gallery Elizabeth had to turn a blind eye on the furious betting that was going on while most of her people were cheering loudly. She couldn’t suppress a small smile though, at the thought that Ronon might not only be distracting Buffy on purpose. 

“I guess we all need a little break,” she admitted while turning around, only to find John several feet away, betting his latest DVD of football matches on the Slayer, his usual boyish grin back on his face.

+

Ronon regained his footing faster than Buffy expected and used his advantage to hit her elbow hard and fast. She took a step back to avoid the brunt of the attack, then spun forward and threw a kick. It caught him only in passing, goading him right into her waiting fist. He flew several feet backwards, landing hard on his ass but immediately jumped back to his feet. He raced at Buffy, who spun aside and shoved him. He fell, kicking her feet out from under her. She landed hard, spinning as she did and burying her elbow in his abdomen. Then they were both back on their feet and circling each other once more.

+

Upstairs, Elizabeth felt slightly dizzy and John cheered loudly.

+

After almost ten minutes Buffy finally managed to kick all the air out of Ronon and quickly jumped to straddle him before he could regain his bearings. For a second they stared at each other, breathing hard before Slayer bent down and closed the distance between them to kiss him hard.

+

Even after both combatants had gotten to their feet and hastily left the room five minutes later, there were still fights going on about who had won. Buffy because she beat Ronon, or Ronon because he was currently getting lucky.

Either way, it took them over two hours to reappear, looking a lot more relaxed than they had before their brawl.

Elizabeth made her way over to the blonde woman to ask if she was alright. Buffy shrugged, then nodded, “I am now. I just don’t sit still very well.”

There was a glint of cold in her eyes, an edge of anticipation that made the other woman flinch back a bit before she swallowed hard and nodded.

+

The Wraith arrived before anyone had found a workable solution, but unlike everyone expected, they didn’t attack. Instead they suggested a deal. Naturally, the discussion going on after Weir had briefly conversed with ‘Michael’ was loud and wild. 

Some people thought they should accept what the Wraith offered and be glad they wouldn’t die. Others were enraged by the fact that agreeing to the terms of the Wraith was even considered. A third party kept mostly silent, unconvinced that aiding Wraith against Wraith was the right thing to do. A last group, consisting of a few hot headed fighters, insisted on pretending to go along with the deal until a way to dispose of the Wraith was found.

Like they had during the discussion about Project Michael, which had led to this disaster, Ronon and Buffy kept their opinions to themselves. They were leaning against the walls on opposite ends of the overcrowded room, occasionally exchanging sardonic looks over the heads of the arguing masses.

It was Dr. Weir who finally restored order by grabbing a stack of files sitting in front of Rodney and slamming it down on the table. Hard. The resounding smack was loud enough to shut everyone up.

“This is not getting us anywhere. One after the other. Slayer, Ronon, what do you think?”

Most people in the room turned to watch the two, remembering that they had been completely right with their predictions the last time. Ronon shrugged and nodded at his lover who took a step away from the wall and looked directly at Weir.

“They’re Wraith.”

There was some grumbling about the cryptic comment not being much use, but Elizabeth as well as John were watching Slayer closely and they both saw the same thing. Rage, hate, determination and disgust. For Buffy, ‘Wraith’ was synonymous for ‘vile’ and ‘evil’. Her reasoning for not agreeing to the deal was simply that they were Wraith. She didn’t need anything else. It was enough that they were what they were. 

Slowly Elizabeth nodded her head, her hands still on the file in front of her. She smoothed the topmost sheet of paper and looked at every single person in the room.

“They’re Wraith. We have forty five minutes left to find a solution.”

“Forty five minutes?! Forty five minutes! Are you all daft? How the hell are we supposed to find a solution in forty five minutes that we haven’t found in three weeks? Even if we manage to blow them up, they’ll still have time to pass on our secret! It’s impossible!” Rodney was yelling himself hoarse with frustration while his colleagues, while not happy about his outburst, nodded silently beside him. They had nothing that even looked promising, much less resembled a real plan!

John lifted a hand to stop his friend’s tirade and surprisingly it worked. He shrugged his surprise off after a few seconds asked, “Why don’t you tell us what you guys have been working on. Maybe someone has a new idea that might help.”

The look he received for that clearly stated that Rodney did not believe that anyone had anything to say that he hadn’t considered yet. Still he started talking, “Well, we know that the Wraith language is a derivation from the Alteran, or the Ancient language. From what little experience we have with Wraith technology, we built the theory that their technology too, is based on the Ancient technology we use. We are trying to find a way to dig beneath the Wraith programs and get into the Ancient basis they are built on. If we manage that, we can rewrite their whole ship mainframe however we please.”

Elizabeth was the first to work through what her head scientist had just explained and asked, “Where is the problem?”

Rodney exploded again. “Problem? Problem, she asks! Maybe the problem is that we have nothing to test our theory on, or that even if we had, we would have to work through ten thousand years of Wraith programming to get to the Ancient part! Maybe the problem is that such things take years and not _forty five minutes_ and we can’t just walk into their hive and link into their mainframe with no idea what we’re doing without getting caught within minutes!!!”

“I can.”

The statement was spoken so calmly that it took everyone in the room a moment or two to work out what it meant. Then everyone whipped around to stare at Slayer who was once more leaning against the wall, arms crossed under her chest. 

“I know from my time-,” she took a small but deep breath that didn’t go unnoticed by most in the room before saying, “while I was a captive of the Wraith that they used their telepathy to handle their technology, like the Ancients did. If their mainframe is truly based on Ancient technology, then I should be able to hack in there. If I can manage to stop their communication and then drop their shields, we can destroy them without being revealed. _If_!”

McKay slapped his own forehead with some force in the resulting silence, embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of Slayer’s ability to link directly to the city’s mainframe. Elizabeth was a bit more pragmatic than that and simply nodded. 

“What do you need in order to try?”

+

Forty three minutes later Atlantis agreed to a deal with the Wraith hive floating above the city, under the condition that a team of scientists was allowed into the hive to check that there were no human prisoners on the ship that the Wraith would feed on during the duration of their deal, as well as convince themselves that the Wraith had no nefarious intentions toward Atlantis.

+

Twenty eight minutes after the Wraith agreed, Buffy cornered Elizabeth in her office and pressed a folded piece of paper in her hands. The brunette carefully unfolded it and read the list of names on it.

“Faith LeHane, Dawn Summers, Willow and Alexander Harris, Rupert Giles, Daniel Ozbourne. What are those names?”

Buffy took a deep breath, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her camouflage pants. “They are names I need you to check for me the next time you get in contact with Earth. If there was a town named Sunnydale that crashed into a sinkhole in 2003, then I’d like you to tell them that I’m alright and they don’t have to worry. If not, then I’d simply like to know how they are doing if I come back.”

Elizabeth blinked. “So you really are from Earth. We’ve been wondering.” There were a lot of things that pointed toward Buffy being from Earth starting with her knowledge of football rules and not ending with some phrases and patterns of speech she used. But until now, no-one had ever dared ask.

The blonde shrugged and for once there was an expression on her face as she did it. A yearning sadness. “ _An_ Earth, yes. Might be some parallel dimension. I’m not sure. And since Rodney is currently writing a letter to his sister, I thought, well, if I’m from this Earth, I’d like it if there were someone who cared, just in case, you know. It’d be nice if someone told them I didn’t simply abandon them and that I died trying to do something good here. It’s been a while since I did anything to be proud of.”

Not knowing what to say Elizabeth smoothed the list between her fingers and placed in the middle of her desk. Then she turned back to the other woman standing in the middle of her office, looking a lot like the small and fragile person she seemed at first glance.

“What would you do if I tried to hug you right now?” She asked.

Buffy snorted, her back straightening a bit. “I’d probably smack you. You’ll check the names?”

“I’ll check the names.”

Satisfied the other woman made to leave the room, hands still in her pockets. 

“There are, you know?”

She stopped on her way out and asked without turning, “Are what?”

“People who care.”

Elizabeth thought she heard a smile in the younger woman’s voice as she said, “I know. I’m trying to get used to it.”

+

+

**Part Four**

+

Ninety six minutes later Sheppard, McKay, Ronon and Slayer arrived at the Wraith hive. The team had been picked cleverly by John and Elizabeth. Rodney was their official scientist, giving him an excuse to run around and ask obnoxious questions that kept everyone from thinking straight (Not that he wouldn’t have done that anyway, but for once he was actually encouraged to be annoying). John was there as the official ambassador and because there was no way in hell he was going to let any of his people walk into a hive alone. Officially, Ronon and Slayer were their bodyguards, as all their weapons had to be left behind in Atlantis. (Although Buffy thought the Wraith really needed to learn how to check for weapons.) Unofficially, Slayer’s job was to try to work her way into the ship’s mainframe and solve all their problems with a bang. Ronon was there to cover for her if she got too distracted and because he strictly refused to let her set foot into Wraith territory on her own. 

Their group of four was greeted by Michael and a guard detail. While Sheppard and McKay at least tried to act civilly, Buffy and Ronon had no such qualms. They simply stood at the back of their group and glowered at everyone.

“I am surprised to see you here,” Michael remarked upon seeing them.

Ronon glared and Slayer hissed, “Oh, we’re only here to make sure we get dibs when it comes to tearing you limb from limb.” Her voice was cold enough to send a shiver down Rodney’s spine, despite the nervous heat he felt at entering the lion’s den.

Michael acknowledged the pure malice in Buffy’s comment with a sketched bow before spinning to walk out of the room. “Follow me.”

+

Buffy felt Ronon’s hand ghost down her spine in a gentle warning that it wasn’t good to draw too much attention to themselves. She leant into the caress for a second before taking a clear step away from it, accepting his intention but choosing to ignore his advice. 

Ever since the arrival of the hive, the city had been raging and raving in her head, screaming for the blood of those that had taken away her people and damned her to ten thousand years of loneliness. Aside from fraying her already taut nerves, the constant yelling for revenge was slowly but surely starting to appeal to the Slayer inside of her. Added to that was her own - pure as snow - hatred of all things Wraith, making for a very explosive combination. The urge to jump Michael and strangle him was physical.

She had to stop walking for a moment to lean against a wall and take a deep breath. John noticed and stopped beside her, asking if she was alright. Nodding her head, she pushed off the wall and made herself slip down into that place she had spent the last eight years in. The place where the pieces of her soul were crowding together, trying to escape the blood and pain and constant violence. She watched dispassionately as John took half a step back from her when he looked into her eyes and instead of finding the woman he’d become tentative friends with over the last month, he saw only death.

Slayer was back and it was time for the Wraith to learn why she’d been the bogeyman of bogeymen, once upon a time. 

Activating her FAT with a thought she ordered it to link to Rodney’s handheld device and through it, Atlantis, before stretching her mind toward the ship’s heart, intent on finding it and ripping it out with her bare hands.

+

As they walked through the hive, pretending to inspect it while covering for Buffy’s attack on its mainframe, John was glad. He watched the look of concentration on her usually blank face and he was glad that Beckett had failed to isolate what made her ATA gene different from everyone else’s because if he’d found it, then it might very well have been him digging through the ship’s computers with his mind. The mere idea made him shudder. The Wraith were bad enough in body. He didn’t need any part of them inside his head.

No that Beckett hadn’t tried. He’d taken enough blood from Slayer to start a medium sized bloodbath in the infirmary, but all his tests had come up with the same result, that there was nothing different about Slayer’s genetic make up at all. Under the microscope she was perfectly normal. Away from the microscope she started chuckling at random moments when some poor guard tripped on the other end of the city and Atlantis showed her. It took some getting used to. 

John got torn out of his thoughts by a beeping sound coming from Rodney’s handheld. Michael and the soldiers stopped, obviously expecting an explanation. McKay opened his mouth, closed it and opened it once more, looking for an answer until John risked a quick glance at the screen before meeting Michael’s gaze had on and stating, “Message from Atlantis. They’ve not made any significant progress yet.”

Luckily the Wraith seemed satisfied with that, as they turned around and started walking again. John risked a quick look back at Slayer, who was currently walking with her eyes closed. The message Rodney had received had come from her, not Atlantis and it had been rather simple.

_Any information they might offer carries a hidden virus._

On the one hand Sheppard was glad that a) Slayer had obviously found a link into the mainframe through her FAT as they’d hoped she would and b) had managed to warn Weir before any damage was done. On the other hand, her message worried him a lot because it was the proof they had been looking for that the Wraith did have ulterior motives and that didn’t bode well for them at all.

+

An hour later things were getting a bit tight. They’d toured almost the complete ship and found nothing to criticise, Michael was getting impatient and Ronon was having trouble covering for his girlfriend. Slayer herself had a constant look of steely concentration on her face, making her look like she was about to kill someone with surgical precision, which didn’t sit well with the Wraith, for some reason. It worried Sheppard that Slayer’s usually expressionless face had chosen exactly this day to thaw.

But there was nothing they could do. If they gave up now, chances were they would not get another opportunity and Slayer’s ability to communicate directly with Ancient technology was their only hope of getting out of this mess relatively unscathed. They needed her to literally get to the root of the problem and rip it out. 

So they kept walking, Rodney kept sweating, Sheppard kept wishing for his gun, Ronon kept trying to kill everyone with looks and Buffy kept following them two steps behind, her eyes empty and cold. 

+

Down in Atlantis things didn’t look much better. Dr. Weir was fighting hard to pull constantly new arguments and demands out of her figurative hat in order to keep the visiting Wraith Queen occupied and blind to what was happening in her hive.

Risking a quick glance at her watch, Elizabeth found herself doing something she hadn’t done in a very long time. She sent a quick plea heavenwards for this to work and all her people to survive this.

+

Buffy was developing the mother of all migraines after more than an hour of digging through the ship’s mainframe with the help of the FAT, programmed in a language she knew, but did not speak fluently. Oh, she’d found the Trojan virus in some data that had been prepared for Atlantis as a bargaining chip easily enough, but that was because the data had been at the very surface of the computers, waiting to be called upon. After that, things had become steadily harder to work out.

In front of her mind’s eye miles upon miles of strings of data were slipping past, written in Wraith. They were not the actual codes, but how the ship presented its information to its telepathic handlers. It was still a mess when you didn’t know what exactly you were looking for and weren’t a Wraith.

Star charts flashed in front of her eyes and gate addresses, plans and routes, the programs controlling the environment on the ship, the lights, the doors. It was all potentially useful information, but utterly useless until she found a way to take control of the whole ship without alerting anyone, so she could destroy the ship while at the same time blocking all communication with other hives. Their secret had to stay within the walls of this ship, if they were to have any chance at all at survival. 

She concentrated on the data strings flashing past, trying to ignore the way they reminded her of Matrix, and a long slow summer binge-watching movies with Dawn, and tried to keep up the façade of bored bodyguard at the same time. Multitasking. Always fun when in mortal danger.

And then suddenly, she found it.

It was so small she almost missed it, but rewinding the string a few seconds and rereading the information on it, she knew that she’d found what she was looking for. The symbols were just a bit softer around the edges, rounder, and they seemed to glow a bit from the inside. Buffy was positive that she’d found the place where the Wraith had linked their programs to the Ancient base system. Or, you know, a symbolic, visual representation thereof. Computers were weird.

If she followed the thread, if would lead her directly into the core of the ship’s computers, allowing her to rip its heart out. She would be able to manipulate the programs, instead of just watching what her FAT projected into her head. She felt a smirk slide over her face, pulled her mind away form her trusty FAT and dived into the mass of data, clinging to the Ancient string of code.

+

Rodney’s handheld beeped ominously. Looking down and reading the message on the screen he almost howled with relief.

_Almost there._

+

Before long the Wraith data faded away, leaving Slayer in the dark with only one string of data to cling to like a rope as she went deeper. 

Suddenly the string started to come undone, falling to pieces all around, her forming the image of a _room_? 

Did she mention computers were weird? Well, Ancient ones were worse.

It was a dark room, not rectangular but bent in all the wrong directions, cold and desolate. It was like one of the cells, half a dozen decks below her feet. At the far end of the room a girl of no more than fifteen, maybe less, dressed in tattered clothes, sat with her knees pulled to her chest. She looked scared, even at a distance, the red of her dress making her stand out in the gloomy environment.

The girl looked up with big, brown, tear filled eyes and begged, “Help me.”

Slayer cocked her head to the side, not for one second trusting what she was seeing. There was something wrong with the girl’s eyes. Something terribly wrong.

“What are you?” she snapped, her voice fading much too fast in the cavernous room.

“I am the ship you’re on.”

“What?” Eloquent, maybe not, blunt, certainly. It worked for her.

“I am Ancient. I am what this ship is built upon. I am a slave. I am an image to make you see. I am a prisoner forced to serve my enemy. I am one of many, a sister to your home.” As she – it – spoke, images flashed in Buffy’s mind. Images of how the world used to be before the Wraith. Of people living in harmony with the worlds they settled on and the ships that carried them through space. The ships had all been semi-sentient, and they still were. But many of them had been stolen by the Wraith, modified and bent beyond recognition. They had wanted to fade with their masters, their humans, but the enemy had caught them like cattle. The Wraith raped what they were, twisting them into something vile and wrong, like they did everything they touched. 

Buffy knew the feeling.

All of that happened in a few seconds, barely a moment. The girl’s eyes were wrong because they were soulless, but that did not make her suffering any less real. The thought of Atlantis, the city she’d come to know almost like a friend, being enslaved like this ship had been, made Buffy sick.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the girl – ship - stood directly in front of her, screaming, “Free me!”

+

Rodney had no time to react as Michael tore his computer out of his hands to read the message displayed on it in bold letters. His head snapped up, reptile eyes focused on the scientist.

“Almost where?”

“Almost home? Like E.T.? But you wouldn’t know that would you, it’s not like-“

He was cut off by Michael flinging his computer back at him and pulling a gun. Ronon sighed loudly, pulled a knife out of nowhere and stabbed one of the soldiers guarding the group in the throat before he had a chance to move.

The fight was on.

+

Buffy felt pain shoot up her left foot and found herself rising above the fake room and the fake girl, travelling back into the real world.

The ship howled.

+

Slayer found the cause of the pain in her foot easily enough. John was standing on it, while shooting incoming Wraith with a gun he’d acquired from one of the bodies already piling up on the floor. He shot her a quick look as she pulled her foot out from under his and drew a hidden dagger out of her left boot. 

“You looked kinda distant there,” he defended with a shrug, shooting another Wraith, “I thought that might pull you out of it.”

She nodded and stabbed a Wraith that had been trying to sneak up on her in the gut, idly wondering why they didn’t sound the alarm. But then all of their attackers seemed to be soldier-Wraith, trained to fight, not to use their miniscule brains. All brawn, no brains.

A few feet away Rodney was beating on another soldier with his demolished computer, surprisingly keeping the Wraith on the defensive. Ronon was ending soldiers left, right and centre with the kind of glee usually reserved for… well. She’d never actually seen him this gleeful.

+

Dr. Elizabeth Weir was not an impatient person in general, but she hadn’t heard from her team in the hive since Rodney had forwarded a message from Buffy more than eighty minutes ago. Still, no alarm had been raised yet. She decided to take that as a good sign.

+

Colonel Caldwell was sitting in his commando chair on board the _Deadalus_ , waiting for some sign, any sign at all from Sheppard and his men inside the Wraith hive. They were supposed to bring down the shields, allowing his people to beam them out before they blew the hive to pieces.

But so far, they’d heard nothing. 

He hated waiting.

+

Slayer nodded to herself. So far everything seemed under control. As long as no-one sounded the alarm, the brawl might be enough time for her to find what they had been looking for. As she let her muscles fall into the familiar, automatic dance of death, her mind sank back down into the walls and floors of the ship, calling for the girl.

+

The room was the same when she returned, much faster than the first time, but the girl was not. Instead of standing, she was now sitting on the ground, heavy, rusting chains wrapped all around her, from her neck to her ankles, making her look like a grotesque sort of mummy. 

“Free me,” she repeated, her soulless eyes staring up at Slayer from the floor.

“Where did the chains come from?”

The girl blinked slowly. “They are visual representations of the programs that bind me and make me unable to act. I created them so you can free me easier. All you have to do is break them.”

Buffy shook her head, “You computers are weird shit sometimes, Jesus.”

The girl mimicked her action of shaking her head before explaining, “I do not understand this ‘weird shit’. What is it?”

Chuckling, Slayer bent and grabbed the first heavy chain, feeling along it for a weakness. When she found it, she gathered all her mental strength and pulled on an image of a chain holding down the image of a girl that was really a ten-thousand-year-old ship. Weird shit, indeed.

+

Rodney slammed the back of his handheld into the side of a soldier’s head, knocking him off balance long enough for Ronon to come over and finish him off.

+

The first chain broke and the girl gifted Buffy with a brilliant smile that went perfectly with her fake eyes.

+

John had taken to shooting anything that entered the corridor they were fighting in from either side, hoping to avoid anyone sounding alarm. Slowly but surely the bodies were piling up.

+

Another chain broke and Buffy’s arms (despite not being real in the artificial prison room) shook with the effort.

+

Ronon took down what Sheppard missed, all the while keeping an eye on his lover, who was obviously working on autopilot. Her movements were tireless and smooth but the usual expression of glee that came with slaughtering Wraith was missing. Buffy worked like a machine.

If McKay hadn’t been busy lamenting their impending doom, he would have called it creepy.

+

One more chain to go. Just one more. The girl could almost move freely again, only her ankle remained shackled to the hard ground. Buffy used everything she had left, every bit of mental strength to tear at the chain, to rip the program the Wraith had used to tie an almost sentient being up for millennia. She pulled and pulled and pulled and finally the chain gave, broken links flying in all directions and falling to bits of data before they touched the ground.

The ship roared in triumph.

Slayer smiled a cold smile.

+

Elizabeth almost fell out of her chair as the ground beneath her feet suddenly started shaking like it had at Buffy’s arrival. Something was bothering Atlantis and that could only mean one thing. 

“Dispose of them,” she ordered pointing at the Wraith Queen and her two guards in an unusual display of coldness. Teyla immediately pounced on them, eager to do her part, after she’d not been allowed to go with Sheppard and the others.

The Queen shrieked.

+

Rodney landed flat on his ass as the whole hive suddenly started to vibrate madly and the lights flickered.

+

Once she was sure that the situation was under control, Elizabeth turned and sprinted out of the room toward the nearest balcony, fixing her gaze on the hive orbiting high above the city.

+

Buffy’s mind snapped back into her body with a little more force than was healthy, causing her to stumble just a bit as the ship started to vibrate. There was a sharp pain in her stomach suddenly and as she looked down she found an injured Wraith lying on the ground, a glistening knife still raised toward her. Without hesitation she stepped on his neck, snapping it.

+

Ronon dove toward Buffy as soon as he saw the dying Wraith move, but he was too slow. The Wraith was dead by the time Ronon reached Buffy. All he could do was pull off his shirt to press against her bleeding stomach. The cut was deep and jagged, going from her left hip up to the right side of her ribs and it bled too much for his tastes. Buffy took the shirt from him, holding it to her wound herself after risking a quick glance beneath the garment.

“Aww, damn.”

Inside her head the ship was shrieking with ten thousand years of pent up rage. She felt something wet on her lip and stuck out her tongue to taste it. Her nose was bleeding from the pressure inside her head and her vision slowly turned pink.

+

Colonel Caldwell jumped in his seat when the biggest screen on the bridge suddenly activated, showing an incoming message. He nodded at one of his officers, who opened it. The note inside made him snort in amusement.

_Taxi please._

“Let’s get those people home,” he snapped.

+

Sheppard thought he could hear the faint sounds of a female voice screaming in agony and rage as he sprinted toward Slayer and Ronon, or rather, Ronon with Slayer in his arms. She was bleeding out of her ears, nose and eyes, not to mention one hell of an impressive wound on her stomach. The lights around them were flickering like mad, the walls themselves were shaking and the alarms finally started ringing throughout the ship. It was pandemonium all around. 

The screaming, he suddenly realized, was the ship and Buffy heard it.

Then there was a white light and everything around them faded into brightness.

+

As soon as they were dropped onto the floor of the Deadalus, Buffy’s eyes focused on the Colonel, blood still running freely down her cheeks and chin. She looked like death warmed over.

“Move this ship, _now_!”

+

Weir watched in stunned silence and shock as the hive blew up in an explosion that rocked the whole planet. 

_Please, let them be safe._

Around her people were cheering and hugging each other. They’d survived. 

+

The cheering suddenly gained in volume and a shout from Beckett made Elizabeth run into the gate room where she found her four wayward heroes sitting and lying on the floor, looking like they’d been hit by a truck. Repeatedly. 

Carson was already fussing over Buffy who seemed to be faring worst. She was bloody from head to toe.

“What happened?”

Buffy slapped Carson’s hands aside but didn’t try to sit up, proof of how exhausted she was. Weir suddenly felt bad for asking.

“I freed the Ancient part of the ship. Turns out she didn’t like very much what the Wraith had done to her and blew them up as punishment and-“

She trailed off suddenly, her eyes going unfocused. Ronon looked more worried than any of them had ever seen him.

“Buffy,” he asked, sounding unsure.

She shook her head and then winced, wiping a bit of blood out of her face.

“Atlantis just forwarded a message from the ship.”

“What did it,” Rodney winced a bit, “ _she_ say?”

She smiled weakly at him, looking quite gruesome with blood smeared all over her. 

“She said thank you. And I think I’ll just-” she waved a hand in front of her face weakly and promptly fainted.

+

It didn’t take Carson all that long to patch up Buffy’s stomach. He was more worried about her head as he didn’t quite believe John when he said the bleeding had been caused by the ship’s ‘death’ scream. In the end he had to accept it though, as everything else was completely alright. Buffy discharged herself less than twenty-four hours later, bribing Ronon into kidnapping her from the infirmary in the middle of the night. 

+

The secret of Atlantis’ existence remained a secret as far as the Wraith were concerned.

+

The bodies of the Queen and her guards were raided by Beckett before they were burned. A nurse commented that even the enemy deserved some respect. Carson offered to send her back to Earth with the Daedalus immediately and never come back.

+

Rodney and his geek squad had a field day or fifty, now that their theory about Wraith technology being based on Ancient was proven. They spent most of their time locked away in the labs, trying to find new ways to disable the enemy’s ships.

+

A month after the whole event Weir stopped Buffy after dinner one evening, handing her a file which the Slayer locked herself into her room with. Ronon found her a few hours later, lying on the floor, loose papers strewn all around her.

“You alright?” he asked, trying not to sound worried.

She didn’t even open her eyes as she started talking, “Alexander Harris died in a car crash when he was seventeen. His best friends, Willow Rosenberg and Jesse Miller survived the crash and became a couple in the aftermath of their grief. They are married and have two cute twin girls. Willow runs a bookshop, Jesse does construction work. Rupert Giles is the curator of the British Museum. He retires next year in order to spend more time with his wife, Jennifer Giles. Faith LeHane died at the age of fifteen on the streets of Boston on an overdose of heroin she’d gotten from a john. Daniel Ozbourne is the bassist of a moderately successful band. Elisabeth Summers is married to one Riley Finn. He has a lot of affairs and generally treats her like shit. She never had a younger sister named Dawn and she never set foot into the town of Sunnydale.”

He sat down beside her, running a finger over the hint of skin visible between her shirt and pants. 

“This is not your dimension.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“No.” Her voice sounded blank, telling him nothing for once.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

She sighed, finally sitting up to meet his gaze. “I don’t know. I wanted this to be my world, just a bit. To see them again. But on the other hand, I’m glad.”

“You are?” It was his turn to sound blank in order to allow her to speak freely. She didn’t need to worry about his emotions when she didn’t have her own figured out yet. For a long moment she looked away, playing idly with his fingers on her stomach, avoiding the question. Then she raised her head, a look of defiance in her eyes.

“Yes. I’m not exactly bubbly Buffy anymore. Someone once told me that my friends are what keeps me human and, well, he was right. Besides,” she stopped playing with his fingers, drawing his arm around her before climbing into his lap, one leg on either side of his thighs, “Besides I kind of like the weather here. It’s nice.”

Ronon chuckled, the sound rumbling through his chest and making her wiggle just a bit. She was never going to say ‘I love you’ and he would never expect her to. 

They were both here, they were alive, they were free, and when they looked in each other’s eyes, they saw themselves. 

That was enough for both of them.

+

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/). Or just to throw rocks at me while i agonize my way through old stories and whine a lot.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Myself in You (can't go back remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12083010) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith)




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